For at least a hundred and fifty years, people have been cooking and selling fried chicken in America. The earliest were black women, newly freed from slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. These entrepreneurial cooks, known as “waiter carriers,” brought their skills and their chicken to markets and train stations to sell to travelers passing through towns like Gordonsville, Virginia. They sold chicken to support themselves and their families, because that was the work that was available to them.
Though their culinary contributions went uncredited for centuries, African and African American cooks were largely responsible for creating what Americans now know as Southern food. From the mid-eighteenth century through Emancipation, dishes like fried chicken were developed and prepared by enslaved cooks, who combined West African culinary traditions with those of indigenous North American peoples and European colonialists.
In the early nineteenth century, white members of high society like Mary Randolph, a distant relative to Thomas Jefferson, wrote cookbooks that commandeered the recipes of black cooks. The books were a revelation to white audiences at the time and helped launch dishes like fried chicken into widespread popularity. Meanwhile, notes writer Adrian Miller in his book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time, African Americans who perfected this dish under inhumane conditions were subject to repugnant stereotypes about their affinity for fried chicken. After being forced through servitude to cook for landowners, and later relegated by circumstance to sell fried chicken for a living, African Americans were depicted in advertisements, postcards, newspapers, and flyers as chicken thieves and animalistic consumers of fried chicken — images and stereotypes that persist today. It’s why many black people in America still refuse to eat fried chicken in public, carrying the stigma with them even if they’ve never seen the images in person.
In spite of these indignities, fried chicken didn’t disappear within black communities. In fact, it spread even farther as part of the six-decades-long Great Migration, during which at least six million African Americans fled a turbulent and segregated South to start anew in northern and western cities.